Justin GordonFounder, The LA Grind & The SF Grind

Hire Smarter: Whippy’s Secret Strategy

22 Apr 2025 · 1 min

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1:01

In this excerpt from the YouTube video "Hire Smarter: Whippy’s Secret Strategy," speaker Justin Gordon shares his unconventional approach to vetting new sales representatives. He acknowledges the difficulty of assessing sales talent, noting that traditional metrics often fall short and that top performers can come from diverse backgrounds, including women. Gordon describes a specific tactic he employed: on a new hire’s first day, he took them to a live show where the company’s product was demonstrated. By observing the recruit’s ability to engage in conversation, project confidence, and read body language—skills he likens to poker—he could gauge their natural sales presence even before they fully understood the software. The live‑event test served as an immediate, real‑world filter, and Gordon suggests extending this method to any company event as a recurring hiring evaluation tool.

Chapters

How do you vet for hiring that person? I think what I learned, so it's hard to, and I feel for those, I feel for our reps. Yeah. 'Cause I come from a sales background and I just believe in just straight beasts, right? And by the way, like, it's not even necessarily, I think like some of the best reps I've ever had are females who have a good sense of just going up and knowing that. Yeah, probably. I think it doesn't matter. I think in the end, it's hard to vet for that. What I did do this time that was really cool is I decided on someone's first day that we're hiring just to bring them to the show. And that was awesome because we actually noticed they had as good conversations as like anyone there. Like, they didn't know as much about the software. Sure. But I would look over and I would be like, dude, he— I don't know if he knows or doesn't know, but he definitely is portraying that he knows. And people are listening, right? Yeah. And you could see the conversations and people are laughing. And, you know, come from poker where you can understand that world and body language. And like, that was a good first test, I would say. So one of the things I've been thinking about since then is if we have any type of event, just bring a rep there.